PKI Blog

In December of 2011, the CA/Browser Forum, comprised of representatives from the major Certification Authorities such as Symantec, Comodo, GoDaddy, and DigiCert, as well as browser vendors such as Microsoft, Apple, Mozilla, and Opera, published a document called "Baseline Requirements for the Issuance and Management of Publicly Trusted Certificates.” This document outlines an agreed-upon set of minimum standards for SSL/TLS cert vendors.

One of these standards essentially calls of the elimination of certificates with 1024-bit RSA public keys by the end of 2013: any RSA-keyed certificate, even end-entity (“subscriber”) certificates, that expire after Dec. 31, 2013, must have a key of at least 2048-bits. This is big news in some circles; a number of public cert vendors have had to change their procedures, and, more significantly, start migrating their customer bases to 2048-bit certs. Many started this process quite a while ago.